Publishing a symbols package and Enabling Deterministic Builds

[severussundar]

Why make this change?

• Closes Publish symbols using a symbol package  #1098 Enable Deterministic Builds when publishing to Nuget.org #1355
  • Publishing a symbols package along with the primary Nuget to Nuget.org's symbol server, enables users to download the symbol files (using an IDE such as Visual Studio) and step through Data API builder source code. This provides them an enhanced debugging experience.
  • Deterministic builds are important as they enable verification that the resulting binary was built from the specified source and provides traceability.

What is this change?

• SourceLink is used for adding source control metadata to the generated binaries.
• Symbols package has the same name as the primary package but with an extension .snupkg
• In the pipeline task for pushing the nupkg to Nuget.org, the pattern is extended to push .snupkg as well
• Deterministic builds require that the property ContinousIntegrationBuild be set to true during CI runs. TF_BUILD is a system variable that gets set to true during pipeline runs. ContinousIntegrationBuild is set to true conditionally depending on TF_BUILD being true.

How was this tested?

• Build pipeline produces a symbols package

Docs

• Docs for publishing a symbols package
• Docs for enabling deterministic builds
• Using Source Link for debugging in Visual Studio

Contents of Symbols Package

[Aniruddh25]

LGTM. Appreciate the research and attention put into this.

[ayush3797]

LGTM after concluding on the NugetCommand@2 discussion. Thanks for making this change!

[abhishekkumams]

does the .nupkg file contains any pdb files?

[severussundar]

does the .nupkg file contains any pdb files?

Yes, the pdb files are present in the primary Nuget package as well. I've listed the approaches I tried to exclude them from the primary Nuget here. Unfortunately, none of them worked, and since, the contribution to size of the Nuget package by the symbol files is insignificant, at the moment, it should be okay to include them in the primary package.

[abhishekkumams]

If the pdb files are already in the main package, what's the need of a seperate symbols package which will contain the same pdb files?

[severussundar]

If the pdb files are already in the main package, what's the need of a seperate symbols package which will contain the same pdb files?

The ideal state we want to be is where we don't have the symbols in the main NuGet package and publish the symbols package. We can continue to iterate on this to exclude the symbols from the main package.